……at least, if the overwhelmingly white, and leftist, Twitter-approved “blue check mark mafia” are any indication. I like Carl Benjamin less and less due to his silly and childish atheism (really, there can be serious reasons for atheism, but his is culturally absorbed and simplistic, and is of the same kind of culturally-dictated thinking that his progressive opponents engage in all the time. In Britain today, it’s much more culturally acceptable and rewarding to be an atheist than a Christian), but he provides a valuable service here, publicizing a Twitter account that highlights all the reflexive anti-white racism of the unhinged Left. Not that I’m on Twitter, or Facebook, for that matter – Google/the NSA have more than enough info about me already from my phone, which I am strongly considering ditching for a dumb model – but this is where more and more of the cultural conversation, the erstwhile public space, takes place, mostly for ill, but that’s where we’re at:

I’ve had another post pending regarding the persecution of conservative voices out of major social media platforms and how that ties in with the movie “Code 46,” but I haven’t got a prayer of finishing that today. So it will probably go in the trash as too dated as another dozen or more attempted posts have gone over the past several months.

I do have some thoughts on Francis, hyper-montanism, and the crisis in the Church, but that will have to wait for next week, if ever.

Not much commentary, I’ve covered all this before, but the author here makes some good points, and reaches the obvious conclusion – the reason the West is in such a state of moral confusion and is possessed of a seeming death wish, unable/unwilling to defend itself, see the threats it is bringing into its very heart (islam), is because it has turned its back on its very nature, which is Christian (Catholic-Christian, to be exact). Those who have rejected Christianity have tried every conceivable alternative, and all of them having failed, they would rather die, and see the whole construct die, than admit their failure and their adherence to a patently failed ideology.

For a quick addendum, see the video below, where Australian leftists (which the large majority are) express their horror at the idea of allowing persecuted whites into their country, and especially their revulsion at allowing Arab Christians from Syria in (see 1:28-35 below). They are ready to surrender, to give the keys over to someone else, someone who still has the courage of their convictions. Amazing, but true. That is how much their false ideology, their diabolical narcissism, means to them. They are ready to see millions die, including themselves, rather than give it up. And note, all the people in the vid below were attending a rally in Australia in favor of mass muslim immigration to Australia, under the guise of “refugee” resettling, which, as you can see, they care nothing for. They don’t give a rat’s rear end about refugees, they want to see Australia and the West remade into a muslim-dominated non-white state.

I do not know how to deal with such people. What do you do with the 10, or 20, or 50, or 80% turned traitor and destroyer in your midst?!? And bear in mind, these people may be fools, but they are by and large not dumb. They know what they want, and what they are calling for – destruction of the West, so long as they believe they can maintain their ease and comfort. They had no kids (speaking broadly), so damn the future.

Speaking of self-loathing death wishes, a reader sent me the cartoon below, and it’s quite apropos. Same crowd, different venue, they all want to see Christendom gone, ,since it doesn’t align with their diabolically informed ideology:

Years ago, Father Michael Rodriguez first came to notoriety outside the El Paso area through testimony he gave to the El Paso City Council against an administrative act – over and above the expressed will of the voters – to extend spousal benefits to same-sex “partners” of city employees. This was after voters had explicitly rejected such extension, in spite of the fact that the very progressive diocesan administration and, it must be said, perverse clergy of the Diocese of El Paso virtually unanimously supported the measure, at least tacitly.

Father Rodriguez was on the receiving end of a very nasty, calumniating attack by an El Paso councilman after he had already given his witness. The councilman was Beto O’Rourke, who is now running for US Senate against Ted Cruz. Judging by the number of yard signs, bumper stickers, and other endorsements I’ve seen around, O’Rourke probably poses the biggest threat to a Republican senatorial candidate in Texas in 30 years.

Reader Dismas is also from El Paso, and knows O’Rourke all too well. Here is his analysis:

You remember when Fr. Rodriguez addressed city council. In a rare event, O’Rourke, a councilman, called him back up to the podium to berate him. Here is the video

Basically O’Rourke is very charismatic. He reminds one of Bobby Kennedy. I was at that meeting but could not access the podium to respond from a medical point of view. He was absolutely wrong and egregiously so, but it would have taken just a bit of medical insight to help people see why he was dead wrong on both counts. I tried to submit an editorial in response and the newspaper refused to print it.

You name the issue. Forcing the homosexual agenda…fully on board, driving the train. Abortion? Full speed ahead. Open borders – all aboard. What else? You name it.

This guy is bad news. Much slicker than Maxine Waters, but fully in the same camp.

There are powerful forces behind this guy.

He is a stealth kinda’ guy in the same way as Obama, who came out of nowhere and the next thing you know he is President.

This guy is very bad news and a serious threat to the nascent recovery this nation has undergone since Jan 20, 2017. If he could take out one of the most stalwart conservatives in the Senate, it would be a serious blow to any hope of building a wall or reversing the always rising progressive tide.

Politico is reporting that my opponent is raising a lot of money and it’s worse than we thought. They are reporting that he has raised $3.5 million in the last TWO MONTHS. That is a ton of money.

To be clear, they are not raising money just to turn Texas blue, they are raising that money to take our shared conservative values out of Washington. My opponent has the full backing of Hollywood elites and far-left liberals.

As, I’ve told you before, I am counting on grassroots supporters like you. I don’t have Hollywood backing my campaign. I have you, and am always grateful for your support.

The money is starting to have an effect. Recent polls show that this race is getting closer and closer. The time to fight back is now. We need to do all we can now before it’s too late.

Look I know these kinds of ads come out all the time but a) this is Texas and b) I think this is one of the more serious threats to make a major surprise move to turn a red seat blue. If you are local to Texas or just concerned about the direction this nation is headed, you might consider giving some money to Cruz’ campaign. I have no compunction saying he is one of the top 2 or 3 most reliably conservative/pro-morality senators on Capitol Hill.

And keep a watch out for O’Rourke. As Dismas noted, this one is very dangerous, has major backing and ambitions, and will probably be back even if he doesn’t win this round.

With a knowing nod to commenter Michele Kerby, who certainly knows that there is a world of difference between a liberal with whom I disagree on various points but with whom dialogue is still possible, a la Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad, and a leftist.

As a case in point – and I know this is painting with a broad brush, but there are so many brush strokes the object is plainly obvious – Steven Crowder held one of his “Change My Mind” public discussion forums in Austin recently on the subject of whether there are more than two genders (Crowder taking the stand that, biologically and on numerous other fronts, there are not, and cannot be). He actually had a quite civil discussion with a self-described transsexual, but a hard left activist at my alma mater, the University of Texas, took such exception to the idea even being discussed that she sent out tweets calling for Crowder and his crew to be firebombed. Just to be certain she was not misunderstood, she included photos of their equipment van and repeated the call more than once.

Of course, the craven, cowardly, and self-seeking administration at UT took no action against this assault on the social fabric. But in a twist of fate, Steven Crowder was a few days later engaged in some mild mannered and humorous trolling, as he often does, at a meeting of the Texas State Democratic party convention, and guess who happened to be there, but the very woman who had incited violence. Crowder very bravely but with great tact and charity sought this woman out and confronted her. The record of that experience is below:

What adjectives would you use to describe the reaction of not just the woman encouraging violence, but the rest of those who showed up to try to shout down and shame Steven Crowder, denying him even the ability to defend himself from violent attack? Some that come to mind – childish, narcissistic, soulless, cult-like, cruel, self-serving, defensive, ignorant, ideologically possessed…….Can you think of a single virtue evidenced by this crowd? On the other side, do you know how hard it is to face that kind of group action and remain not only one’s composure, but humorous? I’ve done it a few times before, and did not remain as cool as Crowder did. He is a strong man in more ways than one.

These are not rank and file democrats. These are leaders and activists – agents of agitprop – in the Texas democrat party. They are among some of the most well connected people in the entire state party apparatus. These are not some weirdo extremists in a basement somewhere. These people have influence, and not a small amount of it.

The actions on display here speak volumes about the present state of the democrat party and the left in this country. It is little wonder major commentators on both sides of the aisle are speaking more and more openly of civil war.

I have been trying over the past several months to see things from the other side’s perspective. I read and listen to an increasing variety of sources, some of them very contrary to my established beliefs. But there are simply virtually no arguments on the other side. It is all invective, scare-mongering, grasping at straws and creation of a fantasy land in which it is the right that is pushing towards “violence” (by saying things they don’t like – note the hypocrisy, leftists act like actual incitements to violence are innocuous, while merely opposing leftist policy on logical grounds constitutes violence – only a child could formulate such a narcissistic justification) and about to bring down the nightmare of fascism on this nation. The evidence for this always remains fabricated, grossly exaggerated, mired in “what about-ism,” or just around the corner. What in reality has happened is that the Left has lost all sense and perspective and is deeply ensconced in an ideological bubble where only things that align with pre-existing notions are allowed to enter. That is why, in the face of massive electoral losses, at every level, over the past 8 years, the democrats have only been able to double-down and press ever further leftwards.

For goodness’ sake, how on earth can you even have a discussion or debate when one side – and it is always the same side, the “right,” to the extent such even exists in this country (in a traditional sense, one not infused with the parasite of enlightenment liberal thinking) – behaves like the most utterly spoiled, ill-mannered, screaming, flailing, out of control children you’ve ever seen? The utter insolence and solipsism is simply beyond the pale. Look at the face of that woman and her associates when confronted – no shame, no willingness to concede even the slightest humanity to the hated “other,” just blank stares and a quick degeneration into formulaic chants and mind-numbing rage once the realization that they were caught out and could say nothing in their defense sank in.

At the root of all this is the growing sense, among these apparatchiks and their masters, that the Left’s ideals, political, cultural, economic, etc., have been decisively rejected by this country. A poll out today showed that even after the incredible vitriol and rhetoric from the Democrats and their propaganda arm, the corporate media (or perhaps because of it), nearly 3/4 of Americans still firmly believe that illegal immigrants and their children should be deported. Should the flood of illegal Hispanic immigration be stopped or even significantly reduced, the Democrats, having turned hard left and growing ever more so as the years have passed, know they are politically finished at the national level, forever. The US public has, for all its flaws, retained enough sense to decisively reject the democrat program. Without, essentially, electing a new population to replace the “failed” incumbent one, the democrat’s political fortunes at the national level are exceedingly bleak, looking to pick up a few House seats, mostly on procedural grounds through jerrymandered redistricting in Pennsylvania and the practical collapse of the Republican party in California.

Thus this entire immigration debate is really about who shall rule, and has been for decades. But you knew that already.

Couple that sense of impotence and failure with a twisted religious fervor and levels of immorality that would make a late 18th century Parisian madame blush, and you have a recipe for true disaster. Leftists are already planning to “punish” the country for voting the wrong way if the democrats, as looks increasingly likely, get creamed in the midterms, by staging massive temper tantrums “days of rage.” Where things go from there is anybody’s guess, but my fear is that things will continue to go downhill at an ever-accelerating rate.

Where is the figure on the Left who has the sense, the presence, and the influence to call the raging, stampeding herd (30 million nutjobs can do a whale of a lot of damage) back from the brink? From what I can tell, virtually all the thought leaders and media/entertainment personalities on the Left only seem primed to go increasingly insane in their rhetoric and action. Twitter and other social media have helped create a perfect storm of ideological bubbles, instant gratification/denial, and extreme emotionalism.

A key problem is that the Democrat party has been undergoing leftist ideological purity tests for the past 15 years or more, very quickly driving all but the most committed left-wing extremists from any participation in all but the most basic party activities (like voting). Virtually all the old line conservative democrats and moderates have been driven from the party, and certainly from most all leadership positions. Goodness, when Dianne Feinstein starts to sound like the voice of reason, you know things have gotten bad.

Where does this end up? No one ever said the United States, as constituted since 1959 with the accession of Hawaii and Alaska to statehood, would last forever. I increasingly agree with Ace, that an amicable divorce along state lines is the best possible solution at this point. But even that could involve unbelievable violence, as those winding up on the wrong side of the line are “encouraged” to relocate a la the partition of the British Raj in 1948. We shall see. I see no solution to all this but prayer and penance, and more and more of both, but there are so few of us, and so many lost in the world and its false pleasures. The number one leisure-time spend in this country is pornography. May God have mercy on our nation, and its people.

Yeah UT, you just go ahead and call me all the time begging for money. You can be sure I’d be just ecstatic to throw a bunch of money at an organization that thinks my very existence is problematic at best, and that probably it would be best to be eradicated.

There was Leftism at UT nearly 30 years ago when I was there, but it was not so institutionalized nor so institutionally dominant. The entire administrative apparatus, which has grown to be larger in number and consume much more budget than academics (at least, of the normal academics budget separate from non-programmed revenues for particular research projects), is overwhelmingly leftist. So, when the campus Counseling and Mental Health Center (staffed by incompetent quacks 30 years ago, I doubt its improved much since then) takes on masculinity, you can be sure it’s going to be from a radical SJW perspective:

The Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas at Austin recently launched a new program to help male students “take control over their gender identity and develop a healthy sense of masculinity.”

Treating masculinity as if it were a mental health crisis, “MasculinUT” is organized by the school’s counseling staff and most recently organized a poster series encouraging students to develop a “healthy model of masculinity.”

The program is predicated on a critique of so-called “restrictive masculinity.” [Who made them God and let them define normal healthy masculine qualities as “restrictive” or harmful?] Men, the program argues, suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or when they are encouraged to fulfill traditional gender roles, such as being “successful” or “the breadwinner.” [Yes, what a hell is created when men are successful and provide for their families]

Though you might enjoy “taking care of people” or being “active,” MasculinUTwarns that many of these attributes are actually dangerous, claiming that “traditional ideas of masculinity place men into rigid (or restrictive) boxes [which]… prevent them from developing their emotional maturity.” [Translation – “traditional ideas of masculinity prevent men from acting like women, which is what we want, and so is undesirable. ‘Emotional maturity’ = feminization.”]

Dear UT, you’ll never see a dime, nor any of my kids.

So who still thinks feminism as a movement and as it is commonly implemented has not metastasized into a female supremacy movement which operates from a paradigm that masculine characteristics = bad and (false, leftist conceptions of) feminine characteristics = good? Furthermore, how much of this is suffused with anti-Christian notions of hatred for the Father which in reality means God? Yes yes not all those who call themselves think this way but the thought leaders do, the institutional powers increasingly do, and the movement is trending heavily in this direction. What else is the “pay gap” all about, except to result in women making more than men per hour or per task in order to make up for preponderance of fewer hours worked by women and fewer jobs performed, but still resulting in an equal W-2 at the end of the year?

A couple of brief videos for you, one from a fairly unlikely source, a professor of physics at UC-San Diego who presents an argument that modern science’s attempt to explain all creation through natural processes absent God is becoming increasingly frayed and desperate. While it is not stated in the video, the key fact that is driving belief in the multi-verse is detailed study that has shown that for macro-evolution to work, and to have resulted in the diversity and advanced forms of life presently on earth, far, far more time would have to have elapsed than actually has, even by the enormous ages of “scientific time” (going back over 10 billion years) to have resulted through Darwinian “natural selection.” That is because the “evolution” that can be actually observed directly takes place so agonizingly slow (for the scienticians), and major variations like severe mutations are almost always evolutionary dead ends, not major breakthroughs.

So major public scientists like Steven Weinberg and Steven Hawking have opined that, since evolution must be true (it is the cardinal belief the God-denying scientists, basically taking the place of God in this mode of thinking), but not nearly enough time has passed for all the multivariate forms of life now found on earth, there must be an infinity of universes out there (existing so that every possibility that can occur in a given situation does occur in one universe or another – like Star Trek’s Mirror, Mirror episode), each one somehow invisibly interconnected with the other, so that there is now plenty of time – indeed, an infinity of time – for evolution to take place. Voila! Problem solved. But as the professor notes below, there is no way to prove these other universes exist, and thus, belief in the multiverse is just another article of faith for the God-denying sexular pagans (which, I would argue, evolution is, as well, since the “evidence” there is largely contrived, or fully explainable by other means):

In the next video, a young woman in Britain who has received numerous death threats for having the temerity to criticize islam (the invasion and subsequent conversion of Christendom by islam is far more advanced in Europe than here) is told by the state – in the form of the police – that it is acceptable to criticize Christianity but not islam. Mind, she has not been told this by one police official, but by several. Coupled with the state’s continued cover-up of muslim pedophile rape gangs that pray exclusively on non-muslim girls, general prohibition by cultural elites of any public criticism of islam as “hate speech,” and a growing kow-towing to islam in virtually every major sphere of life, it appears the successful devolution of Britain from “Our Lady’s Dowry” to muslim despotism is moving apace. Note that gutting of Christianity both in concept/meaning and unity through the protestant revolution was a central part of this process, since protestantism led to a self-serving conception of God/Christ and our relation to them, which led to collapse of belief, which led to rationalism/endarkenment values, which led to where we are today. Painting with a broad brush but I’ve written about this before.

Britain is simply ahead of the US by about 30 years, but the exact same process is at work, here. Why do the powers that be allow hundreds of thousands of muslims to emigrate to this country a year (mostly legally), while legal immigration from the same countries for Christians, or from Christian-majority nations, is extremely arduous? It’s all about replacing the native population, and, more importantly, the native culture, with a multi-culti dystopia. Given the paltry progress on the wall so far, this nation is going to be a disaster for our children and grandchildren to inhabit (sorry for the bare shoulders, it ends pretty quick):

This ascendance of fealty, perhaps obeisance is a better word, towards islam, is a classic case of seeing cultural suzerainty in action. Even though islam has grown at an explosive rate in Britain, it still constitutes a small minority. Muslims constitute barely 5% of the British population, but their political and especially cultural influence far outweighs their numbers. Why is this? It’s because few in the “Christian” majority have any kind of certainty in their beliefs, while the muslims are very convicted. Thus a small minority is dictating much of the cultural/societal norm to the vast majority, which, thus far, has gone rather sheepishly along with this, and has managed to completely co-opt the political class and cultural elites. In terms of actual numbers, there may be far more devout muslims in Britain today than there are devout Christians. Certainly, there are many muslims quite willing to impose their culture and their moral norms on Britain, and very few British willing to defend their rapidly deteriorating legacy culture.

Will the same happen in the United States? I think an argument can be built that it already is. Secularization and collapse of Christian belief and practice has not gone so far in the US as it has in Britain, Canada, and the rest of the West, but it is still occurring, and rapidly. Each generation becomes successively less Christian and, what is more, convicted in their beliefs. I fear the process in the US could be especially ugly, since there may be enough Christian conviction, defusely spread, in the country, to lead to much more open conflict with the implacable demands of islam, which asserts its cultural dominance wherever it gains enough numbers (and, as we see, those numbers are very far from requiring a majority). And Trump’s rise and election was due at least in part to resentment over the seeming flood of muslims into this country along with the unconstrained Hispanic immigration. But that, I fear, will just be the beginning. The elites seem determined to play this most massive social experiment in history out, even though all of history and ethnography shouts that diversity plus proximity virtually always equals conflict, and very bloody conflict.

Perhaps that’s the end goal after all. You can’t get to a “perfect” world population of 2 billion without breaking a few eggs, or heads.

By the way, on evolution, has anyone read Repairing the Breach? I got a copy for Christmas but it will be some time before I can devote the effort to reading it. It’s a massive book, really like a textbook, and some reviews claim it to be THE most thorough attack on evolution that has yet been written. I’m already pretty tied down in reading at the moment, trying to finish Solzhenitsyn, and that is no trivial task, in itself. I think I’ve brought this up before, but if anyone has read Repairing the Breach and would like to provide a review, I’d very much appreciate it.

There are several players in the articles below from Church Militant, all increasingly isolated and bereft of public support from their colleagues and peers. There’s Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth, the man who decided against all good reason to attack the state’s largest and most effective pro-life group (Texas Right to Life – TRL), demanding even that a statement from him to all the Catholics of his diocese refusing them “permission” – on a matter of prudential judgment, as if it were even within his purview – to support TRL and desiring souls from each parish report to him as to whether or not his unnecessary and inflammatory statement was read. As a matter of record, so far as I know – and I know regarding at least 7 other dioceses in this state – Fort Worth is the only diocese where such a statement, issued on Texas Catholic Conference (TCC – the bishop’s conference for the state) letterhead, was created and forcibly read. In fact, other bishops have run for cover, either trying to ignore the firestorm entirely, or outright repudiating the move against TRL.

Then there’s Jennifer Carr-Allmon – former PR staffer for TCC and now its executive director – who has had a habit of lining TCC up on the wrong side of many sanctity-of-life related issues. In 2014 TCC waged war against TRL and many individual pro-lifers over a disastrous bill on end-of-life care that would have substantially worsened the already bad laws in effect. TCC played a major role in supporting that bill and the RINO stealth liberals in the legislature that were pushing it. Only heroic efforts by TRL, attorney Kassi Marks, individual committed pro-lifers, and a few good priests, bishops, and especially Bishop Emeritus Rene Gracida finally managed to raise enough fuss to have the proposed bill changed and improved to the point that it did, in fact, wind up making a positive difference on end of life issues facing Texans.

In all of this, like the USCCB, the bishops are most often led by their lay staff bureaucrats within the respective conferences. That is to say, the bishops are in many cases relying on the lay staff to “stay informed” and give them guidance on many of the various issues, being too busy with golf, exotic travel, and other activities to do so themselves. Thus what often happens is that the Catholic bishops are advocating for the viewpoint of lay staffers of unknown provenance, and certainly without any grace of office, to set Catholic public policy at the state, national, and even local level.

So just bear all that in mind as you read through the highlights of the two reports below, the first reporting that Bishop Olson and TCC may have violated the Johnson Amendment provisions of their tax exempt status in this fight with TRL. Now, I don’t believe there is even a slight genuine threat to their status, but the fact that a complaint has been publicized is a bit unusual. Now, if someone actually files a lawsuit against TCC and Olson with the IRS, then that would be serious. But mere complaints tend to go in the dustbin. This article also ties the support of Olson and TCC to the RINOs to their love – and positive need – for continued unconstrained mass, illegal Hispanic immigration.

Here in Texas, the RINO Establishment has held power for a long time, and this establishment has been largely backed by the Catholic bishops of the state, casting their votes in ways generally approved of by the bishops and their agenda, particularly in regards to illegal immigration issues. Texas is of course greatly impacted by the question of illegals since it shares the longest border of any state with Mexico where most illegals come from………

……….Last week, in what many are viewing as an attempt to directly influence the outcome of tomorrow’s midterm elections, the bishops issued an unheard-of, unprecedented rebuke of Texas Right to Life, essentially claiming teaching authority over the group in matters political. The statement consisted of three major points, but the most troublesome point is the third point where they publicly decry the Texas Right To Life Voter Guide, which supports the young and upcoming anti-Establishment Republican candidates primed to upset the old-time GOP Establishment politicians favored by the bishops. [Not all of these anti-establishment candidates were so young. And in the case of Senate District 8, I think pro-lifers can be practically equally satisfied with either Ray Huffines or Angela Paxton. Paxton won the primary, and it was a nasty, expensive race, but which candidate was actually the more pro-life actually figured quite substantially into that race. At any rate, many voters in Collin County were turned off by Huffines extremely negative campaign and perceived carpetbagger relo to Richardson just to run for this seat]

And here is where the bishops may have actually have run afoul of IRS regulations forbidding Church involvement in politics, a rule known as the Johnson Rule, which actually originated under the administration of Texan President Lyndon B. Johnson back in the 1960s. To have injected themselves into statewide political races just a week before the elections and essentially condemned a political activist group by name, a group that publicly backs certain candidates over others, crosses the line and puts the bishops’ conference in a position where it could thereby lose its tax-exempt status.

Church Militant has learned exclusively that plans are being drawn up and formulated to file a petition with the IRS to have the tax-exempt status of the Church in Texas completely stripped. It that were to happen, the dollar cost to the dioceses of Texas would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and bankrupt many dioceses. Additionally, experts observe that since the head of the Texas Catholic Conference, Galveston-Houston Cdl. Daniel DiNardo, is also president of the U.S. bishops’ national conference, this could actually extend beyond Texas and impact the tax-exempt status of the entire Church across the country.

If that scenario were to play out which observers tell Church Militant is certainly a possibility, the Church across America would become financially insolvent as the 194 dioceses across the country would have to scramble to sell tens of billions of dollars of assets to pay the exorbitant tax bill that would surely come their way in the absence of their tax-exempt status — billions and billions of dollars presently and moving forward that the federal government would dearly love to get its hands on. [As I said, it is extremely unlikely that any serious threat to the Church’s tax exempt status will come from this. But what may well happen is that Olson will get some hard questions behind the scenes at the next USCCB meeting of bishops. Or maybe not. They may all be in perfect agreement. Hard to say with this crew raised in the post-conciliar Church]

How did this happen? How is it that the bishops of Texas would collectively sign on to an agreement that could potentially bankrupt the Church in the United States? The answer, insiders say, lies with one woman, Jennifer Carr Allmon, the executive director of the Texas Bishops’ Conference, the first woman to ever hold that position.

A little background is in order here. The most vocal bishop in support of the attacks against Texas Right to Life has been Fort Worth Bp. Michael Olson who launched a blistering accusatory social media campaign on his Twitter feed, actually telling parishioners to let him know if his orders to his diocesan priests to read the statement of condemnation out loud at Masses from the pulpit were being followed. Olson is the same bishop who ordered Catholic pro-life groups in his diocese not to protest in front of abortion chambers with banners of Our Lady of Guadalupe because the image of Our Lady was offensive to Protestants who might also be protesting.

The behind the scenes of this is that very wealthy supporters of the Church in Fort Worth, who also support the status-quo RINOs, became very concerned that the young Republicans backed by Texas Right to Life were close to capturing the state legislature, according to internal polls. So they reached out to Olson and Jennifer Carr Allmon and said something needed to be done and done quickly before the elections.

One such establishment figure in the Texas legislature the rich want to protect because he is seen as “their man” is Charlie Geren, who barely hung on to his seat in the last election, almost losing to a Texas Right to Life challenger Bo French. That same race is again coming down to the wire and a loss in that race for the GOP-RINO establishment would signal a massive defeat for the status quo, including the bishops who are wedded to that same status quo.

The bishops are interested in maintaining the current political environment because the up and comer Republicans backed by Texas Right to Life are not friendly to the cause of illegal immigration which is the cause fueling the engine of the bishops’ political agenda in Texas. If the state of Texas suddenly turns anti-illegal immigration, the Texas bishops stand to lose a great deal, so they are willing to settle for weak pro-life support from RINOs in order to hold on to large sums of money going to what they see as the most important issue — illegal immigration……. [Well I would say Texas already is majority anti-illegal immigration, as many Texans see quite rightly that if mass illegal immigration is allowed to continue much longer, Texas will go purple if not blue, and this entire nation will be finished, if it isn’t already. But there is not much Texas can do to secure the border, unless the governor wants to activate the Guard and start patrolling the border en masse, which may not be a bad idea but would instantly result in a flood of lawsuits and probable instant court injunctions by activist leftist judges to desist.]

………Reports are that some of the Texas bishops are now backpedaling from the statement, some even privately denying any advance knowledge of it. Some of this backpedaling appeared to be the case in a Friday afternoon interview on EWTN where San Angelo Bp. Michael Sis downplayed the statement and offered that everyone just needs to find common ground and work together — a radical departure from the aggressive tone of the earlier condemnation.

That the entire tax-exempt status of the Church, certainly in Texas and possibly in the entire country, owing to the connection between both Cdl. Daniel DiNardo, could come down to a hastily compiled statement by one woman, Carr Allmon, in charge of the Texas Bishops’ Conference and backed by one hot-tempered bishop wanting to do the bidding of some rich donors with political interests, it’s simply mind-boggling. But given the current temperature of the culture with regard to Catholic matters, a financial tsunami could certainly be in the cards for the nation’s bishops. [He does seem to be hot-tempered. It’s also funny how times change. When Farrell was here, Olson was definitely the more orthodox of the two DFW bishops. Now with Bishop Burns, the situation seems to have reversed. Bishop Burns is generally keeping a low profile and doing the hard work of trying to reconstitute both the badly depleted priesthood (which Bishop Farrell did revive from practical total death of vocations) and the aging and far too progressive lay administration of the Diocese. He doesn’t seek after publicity as Farrell very obviously did. But those cardinal hats don’t fall from trees! You gotta get out there and make a name for yourself!]

This post is getting really long but here’s a bit more on Olson:

Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth is currently steeped in controversy over his attack on Texas Right to Life, a pro-life group focused on electing authentic pro-life leaders in the Texas legislature. Yet in August 2016, Bp. Olson allowed a pro-abortion Democrat to speak on parish property. This is despite recent tweets to the Catholic faithful about his “apostolic duty” to “guard authentic doctrine in the parishes.”

In August 2016, Congressman Marc Veasey (D-Texas) was allowed to speak on the property of All Saints Catholic Church in Fort Worth. Veasey voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act when it came in front of the House for a vote. He supports abortion through all nine months, and has attended Planned Parenthood rallies. [I sadly live in Veasey’s district, one so gerrymandered that there is virtually no chance he will ever face a serious challenge, let alone lose his seat. You should see how ridiculously the boundary lines are drawn in Irving, literally looping around apartment complexes and avoiding single-family homes. Good job legislature! Veasey is a true extremist who supports all the most extreme fashions of the Left – transgenderism for youth, taxpayer funded abortion on demand and any time, restrictions on homeschooling, etc]

Church Militant reached out to the diocese of Fort Worth for comment. A spokesman claimed the reason Veasey was allowed to speak on diocesan property was that the event in question was a town hall and not a stump speech.

When Church Militant asked whether the town hall included a speech from Veasey, the official angrily interrupted, reasserting that the event at the town hall wasn’t a speech. He said he was present at the event and that attendees did ask Veasey about his position on abortion, which Veasey answered by restating his support for abortion.

The diocese claimed that Veasey listened carefully to the pro-lifers in attendance at the event. An article in the North Texas Catholic quoted Bp. Olson on the subject: “My point is, we’ve gotten to the point of our civil discourse — to our understanding of our responsibility as citizens — that the only way we are able to participate in our society politically and to contribute to the common good is in a partisan way.”

In the wake of the Texas bishops’ parish advisory on Texas Right to Life, which Congressman Matt Rinaldi (R-Irving) has called “factually inaccurate,” Bp. Olson tweeted out an order for Catholics attending Mass to spy on priests and report to his office if the Texas bishops’ advisory was not read from the pulpit.

Bishop Olson went so far as to imply that those who don’t read the advisory at Mass are not “true Catholics” and that the advisory is an act of his “authentic teaching office.”

I am told that most parishes did read the statement. Whether it is really an act of his authentic teaching office is another question, there is no question Texas Right to Life supports the entirety of the Church’s Doctrine on the sanctity of life -in fact, it seems to support it better than the bishops often do. Whether one can be commanded to not support an organization that commits no sin and endorses no error – and is in fact totally wedded to the truth – seems dubious, at best. I would argue in fact that it is TRL that is upholding Catholic Doctrine in its truest, fullest sense, and that, prudentially, the more accommodationist position of the TCC and Olson may be accepted for particular matters but is morally inferior to the more hardline stand.

Once again, as we see so often in the post-conciliar institutional edifice, the bishops make dogma of prudential matters and treat dogmatic ones as matters of judgment.

I would add in closing that TRL is the only pro-life group in the state, and one of the few in the country, that correctly ties together the issue of contraception with that of abortion. Texas Alliance for Life, the group Olson and TCC apparently prefer, and which is widely seen as being much, much less reliable on these weighty matters, won’t touch contraception with a 10 ft pole.

Billionaire Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, has spent some of his remarkable fortune on deep sea expeditions, finding old wrecks of historical value. Last year his crew found the USS Indianapolis, sunk after delivering the atomic bomb components to Tinian with most of her crew killed by sharks waiting for rescue. He has also found the massive IJN battleship Musashi.

Just a few days ago, his research team found USS Lexington, CV-2, sunk during the Battle of Coral Sea by the US after she suffered catastrophic explosions from gasoline leaks after being hit by Japanese bombs. The ship, and especially the aircraft, were in remarkably good shape. Even the squadron emblems from “Fighting Three” (VF-3) were still plain as day, as were the dark grey/light grey finish, national markings (including the quickly dropped “meatball” in the star that it was feared would be confused with a similar meatball used on Japanese planes as their rising sun motif), kill markings, etc. Structurally the planes don’t look as bad as one might think after three quarters of a century in the muck and gloom of the deep, deep ocean. In fact they look almost good enough to try to raise and refurbish for museum display. What a historical coup that would be.

Lexington was part of the “first team” of pre-war, often career sailors and airmen who first held the line, and then very quickly turned the tables on the Japanese before massive American production of men and material made the War in the Pacific all but a foregone conclusion.

Totally non sequitur to this blog but ho boy I hope they post a lot more video and pics of this:

Wrecked Douglas TBD Devastator of Torpedo Three (VT-3)

That Felix the Cat symbol is famous and dates back to the 1920s in naval aviation. It is still used today by VFA-31 “Tomcatters”

The Left has tried a new and seemingly effective tactic in their effort to totally disarm the entire law-abiding US population – co-opt children ostensibly traumatized by a recent attack (this one from generally liberal South Florida) into forcing weak-willed Republicrat politicians into a corner, forcing them to do something, anything to “stop the violence.” How about the FBI responding to multiple tips (by name), and local mental health authorities not shirking their duties? Nah, that’s too easy, and more importantly, doesn’t advance the agenda.

So now Trump is apparently going to advocate banning bump stocks, though those had naught to do with the Parkland, Fl shooting, and possibly raising the age of legal ownership for AR-15 type rifles from 18 to 21. Because it’s fine to use an AR-15 type to die for your country at 18, but not for you to own one legally.

Ben Shapiro covers the Left’s very coordinated and, it seems, effective efforts below. Gee, as well coached as these kids obviously are, one might almost wonder if the whole thing was at least allowed to happen, in order to serve a “greater” cause:

While not contained in the quotes included by Shapiro above, these kids have taken a nakedly partisan tack in response to this shooting, openly excoriating Trump and Republicans generally while showing great warmth and support towards demonrats and especially the far Left wing of that party. In fact, it appears to me that these youths are very callously using the deaths of their fellow students as simply an opportunity to advance a policy position they have long preferred – using the logical fallacy of shroud waving in a despicable way to ban evil guns, rather than take action against the people who perpetrate acts of evil, or demanding the government hold accountable those who very apparently allowed this atrocity to take place.

Note the very deliberate F-U to the pro-life movement, commonly associated with the Right politically and, thus, support for relatively unrestricted private gun ownership, in calling this the “March for Our Lives.” These shrill kids are obviously being coached, and Ace notes that the leftist media seems to be doing much of the coaching, with talking points going from statist media one minute and out of the mouths of these kids the next:

See Sexton’s post: He makes an interesting catch. CNN runs gun control talking points as “news,” then these same talking points make it into the mouths of the Child Crusaders, and then CNN now runs the Children Crusaders repeating CNN’s talking points as new news, this time out of the mouths of babes.

As Steven Crowder notes below, so-called assault weapons like the AR-15 are rarely used in these mass shootings, and are responsible for only a very small portion of murders involving a firearm on an annual basis. So once again we see the prevaricating bait and switch of the Left, this time coming from children attempting to capitalize on the deaths of their deceased comrades (demonstrating the degree to which leftism corrupts even at a very early age), where they talk about banning or limiting one type of gun, but what they really mean, and intend to achieve, is a near total ban on private ownership of firearms a la Britain – where, incidentally, the murder rate has skyrocketed SINCE firearms were made very difficult for civilians to own:

I know some see me as a hard-hearted Pharasaical jerk, and I’m about to confirm that notion again, but these kids earn no sympathy from me. As noted below, they are wholly ignorant of the issues at hand, hold very widespread false beliefs (propagated by their leftist media allies) regarding firearms (guns can be bought with no ID, no background check, minors can purchase “automatic weapons” with no problem, automatic weapons are easier to buy that setting up a social media account, etc, etc), and are essentially demanding the nation, and thus millions of law-abiding, hard-working, family-protecting gun-owning citizens turn over the nation’s firearms policy to a bunch of indoctrinated, uneducated, politicized children on the basis of having ostensibly experienced some trauma. Actually, I should say correctly, they had my sympathy, but these obvious political agents of the Left have completely and irrevocably lost it, as they seek to hijack a tragedy for their own personal benefit and the direct personal harm of me and my family (that is, to take away my wife and I’s ability to protect each other and our children). And in the meantime, they intend to usurp a right given by God and recognized by the Constitution for tens of millions of taxpaying, law-abiding Americans. My only response to them is, go frank yourselves and if you want to live in a left wing gun regulated paradise, enjoy your stay in Mexico, where the murder rate is nearly an order of magnitude higher than it is in the US in spite of extremely rigid firearms laws.

As Dr. Peterson says, when you’re 15 or 18 or 20 you don’t know anything, haven’t accomplished a thing, and need to get your own life in order before you lecture the world on all its faults. You don’t even make serious proposals, you just rant against conservatives, Republicans, and the “older generations.”

Unfortunately, the Left may have pulled a coup in drawing children into this debate, since few politicians want to be seen as standing on the side of putting children in harm’s way, even if that characterization is manifestly false, banning guns is not the way to achieve that safety, and there are many other ways to improve the safety of children in government-run taxpayer funded schools leftist indoctrination camp. But that’s where we’re at, and if you want a bump stock, I suggest you buy one now.

And maybe rekindle that interest in acquiring firearms that mysteriously disappeared once the Obamanation left office. At the least, prices will probably be going back up, so now is the time to buy. There are some very good deals to be had out there now, at least compared to the last 8 years when the threat of Obama prompted millions to purchase tens of millions of guns (BTW, a recent study concluded that there are not 300 million firearms in private possession in the US, but upwards of 650 million!). Yeah, good luck confiscating all those.

In closing, I’d just like to add, when will people stop giving their money and time to CNN, ABC, CBS, and all these other naked organs of leftist propaganda, so that the whole bloody business will collapse and go away? Even many conservatives, especially older conservatives, continue to get most of their information from the lamestream media, even though they know the information conveyed is often very biased, missing key nuance/exculpatory evidence, or just plain false. Stop watching them! They are already dying, but a concerted effort will help hasten that end. Unfortunately the politicians, especially at the federal level, continue to treat the statist media as the gold standard, so they are inordinately influenced by what some agenda-driven jaded teen says to 300,000 people on CNN, and ignore what Steven Crowder or Ben Shapiro say to 3,000,000 people on Facebook and Youtube.

As for the post title, you know the old dumb hippie song “Teach, the children well?”………..there you go.

Not really, not entirely, but some discussion on the previous post about how the powers that be in this nation are now completely off the rails, and just when it was that this nation lost it’s way, prompted me to extrapolate a bit on the broader subject of conspiracies. The nation, of course, was in many ways off the rails from the founding, if you are even halfway convinced by Christopher Ferrara’s most important work, Liberty: The God that Failed, but I left a comment wherein I talked about how recent study has caused me to conclude that my previous belief – that conspiracy theories are almost always false – was itself a result of a deliberate effort by the CIA to discredit those who opposed their varying agendas. That is to say, it was the CIA itself that coined the phrase “conspiracy theory” in the 60s to squash those asking uncomfortable questions about the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War, morally questionable (or downright damnable) US activities in many countries, etc., etc……..and in fact came up with all the arguments against conspiracy theories I have tended to believe – that conspiracies are extremely hard to conduct, that they are impossible to keep secret, that to do X so many people would have to be involved that word would certainly get out, that “the real world doesn’t work that way,” among other things. [Sorry for those of you who get posts by e-mail, I wrote this in a huge hurry and really botched the grammar in this first paragraph. The first few sentences didn’t make much sense. Mea maxima culpa]

I had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. To my comment:

One thing I learned recently, which was fascinating and has caused me to re-examine my own previously held notions, is that it was the CIA itself that coined the phrase “conspiracy theory” in response to continued doubts over the JFK assassination and other scandals of the 60s. I wouldn’t say I believe in black helicopters, the Illuminati, chemtrails, or anything quite like that just yet, but it is patently obvious at this point to anyone with an ounce of sense that there is a massive, ongoing conspiracy against conservatism, Trump, liberty, Christianity, and the conception of this nation as founded, or what was long presented as the conception of this nation, that has become so clumsy and obvious of late that it can no longer be ignored, but which in fact goes back decades if not much longer. And yes the US was wrongly founded from the beginning, in being not based on Catholicism (and in many respects hostile to the Faith as it was certainly practiced then, and had been since the early Church), and in being the product of a small dedicated group that sought the overthrow of the existing economic/political/cultural power structure and its replacement with another structure – with themselves in the positions of power. In other words, a conspiracy, and a successful one.

If you read the sad, US-influenced political and cultural history of Mexico since 1800, you will find almost exactly the same thing. A small cabal subverting the will of the vast majority of souls and imposing a hostile and alien construct upon the masses, for their own personal benefit.

And then there is the example of the Church, where again a relatively small cabal, infinitely aided by sympathetic, timid, and/or feckless leadership, has seized control and imposed a radically different construct on the (initially?) largely unwilling masses, and even convinced them of how good and wonderful all these changes have been. Just recently I had an exchange with some septuagenarians, very early boomers who were at just that “right” age at Vatican II, who are just utterly convinced of how wrong and awful the pre-conciliar Church was, and how wonderful all the changes have been. When I presented contradictory evidence, the implosion of vocations, tens of millions of souls lost to the Church in this country alone, etc., etc., they said those were POSITIVE developments, that it made absolutely no difference what “church” one belonged to and those people were probably better off outside the Church, given all the evils like the boy-rape epidemic and collapse of catechesis that have resulted (and that religious life was a crock, that it was a medieval concept for stuffing unmarried daughters and Jesus freaks into veritable asylums). There is absolutely no arguing with these people, no quoting of Scripture, no relation of the wisdom of the Fathers, no statistical data that can possibly move them from their position that Vatican II was an unalloyed good and what existed before an unalloyed evil. These people are wholesale devotees of the new religion foisted on the Church in the 60s. They only remain Catholic themselves for sentimental reasons, or, more demoniacally, to continue the work of destruction (and some of them have been long involved in just that).

These are just a handful of examples. I still do not believe that history in toto is more or less a collection of conspiracies successful and failed, but that doesn’t mean that extremely influential events have not been developed and decided by a (relatively) small group working to a particular purpose.

So get me a tinfoil hat and call me a conspiracy theorist, but honest reading of history reveals that a great many extremely influential events have been the result of a small cadre of dedicated activists, generally working in secret (see France, 1789). IOW, a conspiracy.

And I would say that all the cultural/moral travesties we have witnessed over the past 50-odd years are the result of a deliberate conspiracy aimed at destroying Western civilization and, in particular, the Church, in order to bring about a sexularist socialist “utopia.” I mean, transgender bathrooms, really? or arguing that guys (it’s always guys) who say no to men dressed up as women are hateful bigots? For real? Like that just happened organically, naturally? Riiiiiiight.